All Rise...

The Charge

"You're a bit of a dick sometimes, aren't you?" "We're
all a bit of a dick. It's the human condition."

Opening Statement

The Britcom landscape is littered with jerks. Crooked jerks with an ounce of
conscience; social-climbing jerks that have you rooting for their comeuppance;
characters whose social ineptitude and neediness turns them into jerks; jerks
you hate to love and love to hate. Saxondale introduces a whole new kind of
jerk into that pantheon: the jerk you wish you had the balls to be.

Facts of the Case

Tommy Saxondale (Steve Coogan, 24
Hour Party People), '70s roadie and current exterminator, may be old but his
best years aren't behind him. He's got a classic Mustang, a sexually adventurous
girlfriend (Ruth Jones, Little Britain), and a wide-eyed
protégé (Rasmus Hardiker) who hangs on his every word. He also has an
ex-wife, a grown daughter, and a standing appointment with an anger management
group, none of which actually helps him keep his temper.

Like the title implies, Saxondale: The Complete Seasons 1 and 2
contains all 13 episodes of the series' two seasons.

The Evidence

When Tommy Saxondale blows his top, you really wish it was you. We've all
wanted to go off on women whose hair and skin color come from a bottle, people
who mine their tragic pasts to make themselves seem interesting, or just people
who pester you with flyers when you're shopping, but most of us are too polite
to actually do it. Instead we smile with gritted teeth and take it, even as our
blood pressure skyrockets.

Not Tommy.

No, Tommy tells those women what we're all thinking ("You're
orange!"), confronts those ego-trippers in over-the-top pissing matches
("I once got so high I used a live dolphin as a bong"), and beats the
crap out of those companies' furry mascots. He may be a hothead and a jerk, but
he's slightly less obnoxious than the object of his temper and that makes all
the difference.

Steve Coogan is always at his best when he disappears completely into the
irritating losers he plays and—while he's at his ugliest under the
scraggly hair, pot belly, and bad teeth—Tommy is his most empathic
character to date. Every episode starts with an anger management session that's
a build-up to a blow up but the episodes themselves paint him as old guy
clinging to his nonconformist ideals in his settled, suburban existence. It's
not impossible to believe that his much younger companion, the tattooed and
pierced Magz (The always awesome Ruth Jones), would consider him a kindred
spirit.

Saxondale may be filmed on location,
but it has more in common with the three camera Britcoms of the '70s and '80s.
The stories are standalone set pieces, designed to put Tommy through his paces
without adding to a larger arc or even wrapping them up within the episode, once
the situation has exhausted the comedic possibilities. It should feel shallow,
but it doesn't. What it does do is encourage you to pop in a disc and skip
around as you please. Something I did with the consequence of blitzing through
half the set in one day and almost being late for work.

Dialogue-driven with the occasional outbreak of slapstick violence, the
show's 2.0 stereo only gets going when its killer '70s soundtrack kicks in (most
of which makes it to DVD intact); luckily, subtitles have been provided. The
first season has the same bland look as the original The Office, but
there's a major upgrade in film quality for the second season, resulting a
richer color palette and a sharper transfer. An interview with the series'
writers goes in-depth on the creative process and how the two deliberately
flipped sitcom conventions when creating the show's characters. It's interesting
to see them dissect their work and how much planning goes into making something
seem effortless. A featurette (more on that below), deleted scenes that were
deservedly cut, four fairly dry commentaries by Steve Coogan and producer Ted
Dowd and the usual collection of production snaps finishes off the set.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

Both of Season 1's discs have badly executed menus. Each one is designed
around a clip from the show that only continues as you move from one option to
the next. These stops are so abrupt the DVD looks like it's frozen. It doesn't
help that there's a lag as you shift from one screen to the next and that
buttons are randomly assigned. Sometimes it's the left arrow that gets you to
the next menu, sometimes the right, sometimes I gave up and hit combos until
something happened. My thumbs haven't been this sore since my
Darkstalkers days.

Not only is the set-up frustrating, it makes it hard to tell when the DVDs
are genuinely malfunctioning. No matter how many remote tricks I tried, I was
never able to get past the first five minutes of the "On the Road"
featurette because of its constant stuttering. I could use that as proof for my
hatred of overlapping DVD cases but the disc was on the bottom layer and fully
protected.

Closing Statement

Saxondale: The Complete Seasons 1 and 2 is suspiciously primed to
street a week before Coogan's Hamlet 2. If
you're even the slightest bit misanthropic, do yourself a favor and pick up this
instead. It will do your blood pressure a world of good.